Opinions On the Racial Frying Pan

Applications and various forms ask us what race we are. But is race real? Assuming a “yes” to this question may surprisingly be wrong. We may now need to ask: if the experts reject “race”, will the majority of society ever accept that change? “The human races were (actually) invented by anthropologists … back in the eighteenth century in an attempt to categorize new groups of people being encountered and exploited as part of an ever expanding European colonialism.” Moving away from that “weapon of the powerful” may be asking for too big of a leap, science or not, for a world still rigidly resisting the premise of climate change, but like with climate change, we should at least start voicing the facts.

The article below found in the AlterNet, by Darren Curnoe, sites a survey of anthropologists that “makes a very powerful statement. It is a resounding rejection of race by those scientists whose discipline invented the system of racial classification itself.” Again, that was the field of anthropology. Such a bold change would subject a massive amount of research and statistics to the category of almost fiction. For we now see “the near universal acceptance by anthropologist of decades of genetic evidence showing that human variation can’t be pigeonholed into categories called races.” Surprisingly critics of the use of racial classifications have been around for quite a while. “One famous critic of racial theory was the American anthropologist Ashley Montagu who wrote in 1941: The omelette called ‘race’ has no existence outside the statistical frying pan in which it has been reduced by the heat of the anthropological imagination”.

Evidently it is far past time that we begin to to examine and correct another myth that has been so effective in erecting a society that mysteriously works for some and not others. Read the entire article below. Your eyes may be opened in a new and enlightening way.